Natural Selection

Seasonal flora and nature’s marvels serve as inspiration for Gucci's latest high jewellery collection.

- MINDY TEH

The splendour of an Italian garden is interpreted to its full expression with Gucci's latest high jewellery collection, Allegoria. Like its name, the collection presents an allegory of the four seasons, from spring with its symbol of new life and fertility to winter with its collected cool.

No mere accident, then, that the collection was recently revealed at the maison's birthplace of Florence, where guests were able to view its pieces up close. After all, the Tuscan capital's lush, verdant gardens such as the Bardini, Boboli, Rose and Iris are the very stuff of legend and have been celebrated in great works of art, film and literature.

The Boboli Gardens, in particular, spurred the imaginations of many a writer and poet the likes of Hermann Hesse, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Albert Camus. Opened to the public in 1766 and originally intended for the Medici family, the garden behind the Pitti Palace is the first and most important representation of an Italian garden and has been an inspiration for many European court gardens and settings.